Hill Country MD

🇺🇸 What makes this story better? Chamberlain shouldn't have even been alive. Less than a year before receiving the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, then Col. Joshua Chamberlain took a Minié ball straight through his pelvis at Petersburg. The bullet shattered bones and severed his bladder and urethra. The injury carried a 90%+ mortality rate. But Chamberlain refused to die. In a field hospital tent, without proper anesthesia, Dr. Abner Shaw spent hours probing the wound. To map the severed urinary pathway, he used a highly experimental procedure. He inserted two long, metal surgical probes into opposite ends of the tract until they clicked together, a method that laid the groundwork for modern urological surgery. The pain was so torturous for Chamberlain that Shaw begged to stop just to let him die in peace. Chamberlain flatly refused and ordered him to keep cutting. Miraculously, he survived. Just 5 months later, he was back in the saddle leading troops in the final campaign of the war. But his wound never truly healed. It left him with an external fistula that leaked urine constantly. He required primitive catheterization and endured severe chronic pain and recurring infections for the rest of his life. He underwent 4 more unsuccessful surgeries in his lifetime (in 1865, 1866, 1883, and 1893) to try and close the wound. All of them failed. Yet, despite all this, he not only came back to the war, he went on to serve 4 terms as Governor of Maine and 12 years as the President of Bowdoin College. Legend.

A tourist was seriously injured after a bison tossed them about 8 feet into the air in Yellowstone National Park. The attack was captured on video by photographer Mike Macleod.